The Sound of Sadness Overwhelms and Inspires Mount Eerie

Think of all the tricks and stratagems we employ to hold grief at bay — the time-filling activities, the eating, the emotional jiu-jitsu. Anything to take up the space that grief craves and feeds on.

Imagine none of those things were options, though.

This is what “A Crow Looked at Me,” the new Mount Eerie album, proposes, and documents, and renders in vivid, bruised grayness.

Mount Eerie is the recording project of Phil Elverum, who’s been making music under this moniker for about 15 years (and before that, as the frontman of the Microphones) in the port town of Anacortes, Wash. In 2003, he married Geneviève Castrée, a cartoonist and musician.

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“A Crow Looked at Me,” the latest Mount Eerie album.

They led an intimate life full of creative production. In 2015, they had a daughter. Not long after, Ms. Castrée learned she had inoperable pancreatic cancer, and last July, Ms. Castrée died, at 35.

The grief took up all the space, until it took up residence inside Mr. Elverum, and began to announce itself via songwriting. Actually, songwriting seems almost too precise a term. Mr. Elverum has always been an impressionistic lyricist, but here, the line is blurred between singing, speaking and raw emotional data dump.

The results are harrowing but tender — much more tender than harrowing. Mr. Elverum works largely in the second person, because for most of the album, he’s directly addressing Ms. Castrée. It’s as if you’re watching him annotate each fresh revelation of her absence with a note he hopes she one day might see, or maybe can hear right now, in some leap of cosmic communication.

He began recording these songs when the wounds were still gaping. “It’s August 12th, 2016/You’ve been dead for one month and three days,” he sings on “Ravens.” On “Swims,” he documents the moment of Ms. Castrée’s death with glowing warmth wrapped around throbbing anguish. On “Ravens,” he’s apologetic: “I watched you die in this room then I gave your clothes away/I’m sorry, I had to.”

It’s the smallest details that stab hardest here — the ones that feel tossed off but are also the work of an elegant songwriter knowing just how to render devastation. The album opener “Real Death” — the phrase “death is real” makes appearances throughout the album, as if Mr. Elverum is still needing to remind himself of that fact — turns on an awful moment that limns the space between the living and the dead:

I go downstairs and outside and you still get mailA week after you died a package with your name on it cameAnd inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secretAnd collapsed there on the front steps I wailedA backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from nowYou were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down would not include youThough you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down

Occasionally he reaches for air, only to realize how suffocating real life is. On “My Chasm,” he comes to understand how his pain is the reagent in all conversations: “Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?/Or does the room go silent when I mention you?”

On previous Mount Eerie albums, Mr. Elverum has balanced songs like these — intimate, with little adornment — with some that flirt with folksy flourishes of metal, a different sort of catharsis. But there’s little here, apart from a couple of guitar revs on “Soria Moria,” that interrupts his narrative.

So intense are these songs that it feels almost impolite to refer to them as art, which typically connotes an interest in aesthetics. There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.

Slowly, agonizingly, this album moves from fresh wound to the beginnings of a scar, which in this context, is its own sort of wound. “Toothbrush/Trash” delivers the horrible realization that time will not relent — it will force Mr. Elverum to go on, require him to find ways to cope, even as he rages against the idea:

I realized that these photographs we have of youAre slowly replacing the subtle familiarMemory of what it’s like to know you’re in the other roomTo hear you singing on the stairsA movement, a pine cone, your squeaking chair

Unlike the others, the final song, “Crow,” is addressed to his daughter: “Sweet kid, what is this world we’re giving you?/Smoldering and fascist with no mother.” Here is one place Mr. Elverum considers that Ms. Castrée isn’t far away — she’s the bird in the sky, the one that populates his daughter’s dreams.

He also talks about seeing Ms. Castrée on “Seaweed,” in which he details spilling her ashes outdoors, on a chair facing west. “But the truth is I don’t think of that dust as you,” he sings, then pauses, and for a moment, he sounds indisputably, reassuringly steady when he announces, “You are the sunset.”